Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversations

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Mike Evans

Mike Evans (PhD McMaster 1996) taught at the University of Northern BC, the University of Alberta, and then joined Okanagan University College, later UBC Okanagan (2005), becoming Professor in Community, Culture and Global Studies in 2010. He is presently Professor of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University in northern NSW, Australia. Dr Evans has been involved in several community based research initiatives, and in particular has a long-term relationship with the Prince George Métis Elders Society. He has also worked extensively with colleagues at the Métis Nation of British Columbia on a number of research projects dealing with historic and contemporary Métis communities in BC. Together with Elders and community leaders in Prince George he put together a Métis Studies curriculum for UNBC and a number of publications including What it is to be a Métis (Evans et al 1999, 2007), A Brief History, of the Short Life, of the Island Cache (Evans et al 2004). He has also worked on a number of participatory video projects with collaborators from the Métis community and videographer and new media artist Stephen Foster. He is involved in a number of active research projects funded national funding bodies like CIHR concerned with Cultural Safety and Aboriginal health, especially in the Urban Aboriginal and Métis communities. In addition he has worked with people in Tonga on the impact of globalization and transnationalism has also resulted in numerous papers and presentations such as the monograph Persistence of the Gift: Tonga Tradition in Transnational Context (2001), and a co-edited special issue of Pacific Studies titled Sustainability in the Small Island States of the Pacific (1999) and a co-edited volume of Human Organization titled Customs, Commons, Property, and Ecology: Case Studies from Oceania. He has also worked with a team of Tongan and Canadian researchers on the health impacts of globalization in Tonga; a number of publications that demonstrate the negative consequences of the trade in health compromising foods (e.g. www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2001/issue9/bu1327.pdf) have come from this collaboration.

Sneja Gunew

Sneja Gunew (FRSC) B.A. (Melbourne), M.A. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Newcastle, NSW) has taught in England, Australia and Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She was Director of the Centre for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002-7) and North American editor of Feminist Theory (Sage) 2006-10. She was Associate Principal of the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, UBC 2008-11.

She has edited and co-edited four anthologies of Australian women’s and multicultural writings; Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (1990-91). In Australia, she compiled (with others) A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers (the first such compilation in Australia) and co-edited Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (1992), the first collection of critical essay to deal with ethnic minority writings in the Australian context. She set up the first library collection of ethnic minority writings in Australia. Continuing her focus on cultural difference, Gunew edited (with Anna Yeatman) Feminism and the Politics of Difference (1993) and (with Fazal Rizvi) Arts for a Multicultural Australia: Issues and Strategies (1994).

Her books include Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (2004). Her current work is in comparative multiculturalism and in diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations.

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sgunew/

Joy Johnson is a Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia with a long standing interest and leadership in the field of gender and health. She served on the inaugural steering committee for the BC Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health and was a co-leader on the BC Network for Women’s Health Research. Dr. Johnson founded and co-directed the highly successful multidisciplinary research unit NEXUS, dedicated to research, knowledge translation, and training in the social contexts of health behaviour. She was appointed Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Gender and Health in January 2008. In this role she works with the Canadian gender, sex and health research community and stakeholders to identify research priorities, develop research funding opportunities, strengthen research capacity, build partnerships and translate research evidence to improve the health of Canadians.

Dr. Johnson has a highly productive program of research focusing on health promotion and health behaviour change. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical perspectives her work explores the social, structural and individual factors that influence the health behaviour of individuals. A major thrust of her work focuses on sex and gender issues in substance use and mental health. She has obtained millions of dollars in research funding from national funding organizations and has published over 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Johnson’s work has been recognized with numerous awards including the UBC Killam Research Prize. In 2010, she was recognized as one of British Columbia’s 100 Women of Influence.

Nicholas Kotsiras is currently the Minister for Multicultural Affairs & Citizenship in the Victorian Government (Australia). He is also the Chair of the Ministerial Advisory Council for a Multilingual & Multicultural Victoria.

Nicholas emigrated from Greece to Australia in 1964 and was first elected to the Victorian Parliament in 1999. He was re-elected in 2002, 2006 and 2010.

Before entering the Victorian Parliament he was a secondary school science and senior mathematics teacher. He has taught in both the public and independent school sectors.

Nicholas worked as ministerial advisor to the Victorian Premier on multicultural affairs and later Chief of Staff to the Minister for Tertiary Education and Training in the Victorian Government.

Since 1999 Nicholas has held several Shadow Ministries, including Youth, Sport and Recreation, Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship and Innovation.

He has also held a number of positions on Parliamentary Committees, including: Deputy Chair, Education and Training Committee 2003-2010, Standing Orders Committee 2007-2010, House Committee 2007-2010 and was Acting Speaker of the Legislative Assembly 2004-2010.

Jack Levin, Ph.D. is the Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, where he co-directs its Center on Violence and Conflict.  He has authored or co-authored 30 books, including Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers—Up Close and Personal, Why We Hate, Hate Crimes Revisited, and The Violence of Hate. Dr. Levin has also published more than 200 articles and columns in professional journals, magazines, and newspapers (such as the New York Times, the London Sunday Times, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Tribune), and has appeared frequently on national television programs (such as Oprah, Good Morning America, Today, 48 Hours, 20/20, America’s Most Wanted, The O’Reilly Factor, and Larry King Live).   Levin was honored by the Massachusetts Council for the Advancement and Support of Education as its “Professor of the Year.” He recently received a major award from the American Sociological Association for his efforts to increase  the public understanding of sociology and also was the recipient of the Apple Award from the New England Sociological Association and the Lester Ward Award from the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology. Levin has spoken to a wide variety of community, academic, and professional groups, including the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (a membership of 59 countries), the National Organization of Hostage Negotiators, forensic psychiatrists from the Royal College of Psychiatry in the UK, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Margo Tamez is Konitsaii Hada’didla Ndé, a member of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas and an Assistant Professor in the Faculties of Indigenous Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (Canada).  She is the Co-Founder of the Lipan Apache Women Defense and the Emilio Institute for Indigenous Human Rights, both located on the Texas-Mexico border, and situated as Indigenous peoples’ sites of self-determination and autonomy, in collaboration with local Elders, activists, community leaders, and binational and international organizations. Tamez established the very first Apache IPO (Indigenous Peoples’ Organization) at the United Nations in 2008, which laid down a critical mechanism for local-global advocacies for many marginalized and under recognized Apachean peoples in some of the poorest communities of U.S. society.  She is an active participating member, and serves in a distinguished role as Rapporteur for the North American Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus, which bridges Indigenous community-based aspirations to international decision-making processes at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.  She is active, in coordination with the Red Xicana (U.S.), with the ENLACE Continental de Mujeres Indígenas de las Américas, and in that capacity, in 2010 was appointed to the ENLACE Commission on International Instruments.  Tamez is active in energizing Indigenous Action Research alongside individuals and a group engaged in militarized conflict zones, and has worked with Indigenous peoples in the recovery, recuperation, and the development of Indigenous knowledge under threat of destruction and erasure.  Her advocacies in issues of lands and territories, autonomy, decision-making and rights, have prioritized Elders, Indigenous women’s, families’, youth, and workers’ perspectives from communities who have historically struggled with colonialism relative to Spain, Mexico, settler societies, and U.S. expansionist histories. 

Her current scholarship, teaching, and community service are informed by direct engagement with, for, and alongside Indigenous Peoples in the protection of Indigenous story-work, counter-narrative, testimony and documentation as expression of violent rights struggles unfolding along the Texas-Mexico border.  Her advocacies have involved her visible 2009 testimony at the Inter-American Commission/Organization of American States, as a historian- advocate for impacted indigenous peoples dispossessed by the state and corporations which constructed the U.S. Border Wall.  Her approaches in the application of Indigenous methodologies has infused the ongoing human rights investigations of law professors and law students at the University of Texas Law Working Group, who, along with Tamez and indigenous activists, are working today to inform the public and academics about the U.S. government’s gross violations of human rights against hundreds of poor, Indigenous and Latin@ land owners, and the build-up of militarization and high-tech dirty wars in Texas-Mexico border communities.  Tamez’ publications related to anti-colonial, anti-militarization, and anti-imperialism include “Restoring Lipan Apache Women’s Laws, Lands, and Strength in El Calaboz Ranchería at the Texas-Mexico Border,” Signs, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 2010) and “Our Way of Life is Our Resistance”: Indigenous Women and Anti-Imperialist Challenges to Militarization along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Susan Comfort, Ed., Works and Days 57/58, Vol. 29, 2011.  Tamez is the author of critically acclaimed poetry collections, Raven Eye (University of Arizona, 2007) and Naked Wanting (University of Arizona, 2003), which bring focus to marginalized, poor Indigenous women’s struggles for visibility, autonomy and human rights, in the Arizona-Texas-Mexico border state complex.  She is currently writing a book on the recovery of Lipan Apache community history, and indigenous women’s legal genealogies in anti-colonial struggles in Lipan country dating back to the 16th and 17th century.  She will be sharing Indigenous peoples’ insights and analysis of state violence and indigenous dissidence under the spectre of genocidal policies directed toward indigenous resistances as expressed in U.S. Department of Homeland Security et al.  v. Tamez.